The Hooker
3.00 am. We are standing in an alley that snakes like a river of piss and honey, she and I, facing one another. She sucks on the cigarette like it’s mother’s milk, and holds on to it like it’s a branch hanging over a bottomless crevice. Three stubs lie around her like acorns, their poison still drifting into the steamy air.
Her fingers are trembling and she’s gnawing her thumb into a stump. Her left arm presses her bag into her breasts like it’s a child needing comforting, the hand absentmindedly caressing her neck. Her furtive eyes actively avoid mine. Every question is met with a nervous giggle and a vacant “Yeah”. She must be new at this.
Her black satin slip looks more like what you’d wear at bedtime if you’re feeling naughty and you’ve run out of undies. Her stocking has a tear just below the right knee and I idly muse if she’d gone Catholic on someone in a street somewhere. She’s got dark wavy hair that cascades past her shoulders, framing a face so fine you know she must have one of those flowing names that sound like someone farting slowly through a silk bedsheet.
|
Somewhere along the line I’d asked and she’d told me to call her Nora. She’d come up to me pretending to look for a light. When I said I didn’t smoke she giggled nervously and said it was a nice night. Yes, I said, if we’re in hell. The haze was back and you could detect the faint smell of sulphur, like an iron spoon dipped into your cup of warm water. Somewhere out in the shadows Lucifer is watching our little talk.
She didn’t respond to my little joke. Instead she looked away, and her hands fiddled in her bag, and she fished out a pack of greens, and she offered me one. No, thanks, I said, and with a smirk I added that I still didn’t smoke.
She glanced at me as if I’d just told her we were having chicken for dinner tonight. Her hands dove back into the bag and reappeared with a lighter. One of those cheap ones you buy and throw away. Her face disappeared behind a cloud of white. After a while she said it was odd that I didn’t smoke.
She laughed but her eyes didn’t
I said I didn’t need to, since I get all the ash I need by just breathing the air around me. This time she laughed, although her eyes still didn’t.
I’d watched as she meandered up the alley, carefully stepping around the many puddles. I thought she was another one of Leslie’s Law. My friend Leslie, this skanky little man who was so skinny you could see his adam’s apple bobbing up and down when he spoke like it’s something he’d swallowed that had gotten stuck in his windpipe, had this theory that 9 out of 10, women who look good from afar don’t live up to the illusion up close.
Leslie died of AIDS three years ago. Nobody realised he’d had it until five weeks later when his pusher barged through the door demanding overdue payment. By then his body had turned into mulch and had seeped through the mattress and into the wood. The pusher added to the porridge by spontaneously puking into it.
The coroner decided he had better things to do on a Wednesday afternoon than to scoop poor Leslie out with a ladle in order to get his bones, so he simply stuffed the whole mattress into a large plastic bag and carried that away. The landlord then burnt the whole house down.
Nora has a face that defies Leslie’s Law. Her body is not so hot. She’s not young, probably in the late 30s. Plumpish. But she’s got bumps in the right places and her meaty calves are just begging for a hearty bite. You might not even wait to take the stringy heels off. She’d put colours on her toenails but it’s impossible to tell what shade they are. The yellow light makes everything look like you’d stepped into a sepia postcard.
The exchange
I’m leaning against the streetlight pondering the many reasons why she might be doing what she’s doing. The silence is suddenly broken by a colony of chimpanzees screeching on their motorcycles in the distance.
I’m looking at Nora and at the noise she looks my way and notices that I’m looking at her. I suddenly acquire a hole in my head as she looks right through me and offers a feeble smile.
Well? (Pause) How much is it?
It’s always awkward, but it has to be dealt with right upfront. Once you know where things are heading you just have to get on with it. Next comes the inevitable bargaining.
That’s too high.
(Pause)
There are certain rates for certain services, of course. It’s all structured like any other consumer transaction, like buying coffee in a supermarket. Can’t afford drip-brewed Brazilian beans? Here’s the Nescafe Cap Colombie for you, sir. Still a bit above your means? Try the Golden Roast. And so on and so forth, down the ladder you go until you get to the really cheap stuff that’s 60 percent ground coconut-shell.
Even then you still have to negotiate, because that’s just the way it is. You learn to expect that. So that’s what we do, Nora and I: we parry like two musketeers too old to lift their sabres yet unable to set aside their pride. I could tell her heart’s not really into it and she agrees on a price too soon.
Great, I said. Let’s get to it then. Here or…?
Lucifer beckons
She goes quiet. Looking away she sees Lucifer peeping from the shadows and sees an old man, nodding sagely. We are already at the pearly gates - my pearly, her gate. A sexual trinity of She, Me and old man Lucifer.
Manna drips from the drainpipes and mossy stains on the shadow-clad walls are the gardens of delight. Plenty of virgins to serve you here, boss, as long as you don’t mind hand-me-downs. You can do them where you like. In the gap-toothed street with rats scurrying up your tights, in the dank rooms with curtains that flutter furiously on a windless night. Ripples in the drains register every thrust of the member, or you can feel the earth move under streetlights raining amber. Welcome to pleasuredome, boss.
So there we are, standing in the middle of pleasuredome, with me already biting into her juicy calves in my mind. And then she starts to cry.
Her lips purse up and shortly after tears begin to stream down her cheeks. Before long, she’s sobbing. It felt like something is choking in her throat and the more she tries to stifle it the more it struggles to break free. A terrible whining emanates from within her being.
Look, I said, if you’re not…
She starts weeping openly. I step towards her and reach out for her left elbow, but she brushes my hand away and wraps herself completely in her sorrow. It could have been 10 minutes, it could have been an hour, or mere seconds, but I stood there under my streetlight for an eternity trying not to notice the sobbing wreck in front of me. Finally, the waves subside into a trickle.
Are you alright, I asked.
She nods. Bends down to pick up her magician’s bag, from which she produces a pack of tissues this time. I’m sorry, she says, after a while. I… my husband…
She turns and looks me in the eye.
My husband… he shouldn’t… I just…
That was the last time…
I wait for the words that would not come, for she starts to turn and walk away. A few feet and she turns around to face me again, smiling this time. We stand there for another eternity, a bridge hanging over the chasm between us, and then she turns for the last time and disappears into the night, splashing into puddles as she went.
Somewhere down the main road a car alarm goes off and then I hear the familiar squawk of the remote turning it off. Alone again. I look around. A half-smoked cigarette smoulders in the semi-darkness. I stoop down to pick it up. Red lipstick stains the filter. In between my fingers it almost looks harmless. I had half a mind to put it to my lips and inhale deeply when a voice, male this time, coughs behind me.
How much?
I swivel around. The man is short and balding, with thick glasses that make him look like a caricature. That depends, I say, smiling. Oh? he says, on what? Well, I say, let’s talk.
I flick the cigarette and the memory of its weeping madam into the darkness where Lucifer stoops down and takes a long puff as he watches the Chinaman and I walk through the pearly gates.
